In today's cable, television and telecommunications environments, cable carriers are striving to offer customers services with maximum added value and variety. At the same time, consumers are demanding devices and services that support an increasing number of simultaneous channels so they can have TV and high-speed Internet throughout the home, hundreds of HD broadcast channels, thousands of video-on-demand programs, multimegabit high bandwidth services, etc. Further, content is expected to be streamed to a variety of devices, including laptops, televisions, mobile devices, tablets, and personal computers. However, the scalability of traditional cable tuners for providing multiple simultaneous channels is limited due to constraints of size, cost, power consumption, and heat dissipation.
For example, in the case of the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification 3.0 (DOCSIS 3.0) standard, cable carriers can bundle up to sixteen channels and deliver them to a customer. Since the video channels could be placed at any frequency in the cable 1 GHz band, and, because the switching time between the channels needs to be very short, and further considering that carriers will offer internet services with flexible speed, a single carrier may prefer to have access to sixteen, twenty four, thirty two or some other number of channels at the same time.